The Korean company has rented New York’s Radio City Music Hall for an event this evening. The company has hinted that it will reveal the Galaxy S IV phone.
Judging by the announcement of the S III in last May, this means the new phone will be available in stores in a month or two.
It’s not known what the new phone will look like or how it will differ from its predecessor, but there’s speculation that Samsung will once again increase the screen size. Every successive generation of the Galaxy line has been bigger than the one before, and the S III sports a screen that measures 4.8 inches on the diagonal, substantially larger than the iPhone 5’s 4-inch screen.
In the last two years, Samsung has emerged as Apple’s main competitor in the high-end smartphone market.
The Galaxy line has Samsung’s chief weapon in the fight, and it has succeeded in making it a recognizable brand while competitors such as Taiwan’s HTC Corp. and Korean rival LG have stumbled. Samsung has sold 100 million Galaxy S phones since they first came out in 2010.
That’s still well below the 268 million iPhones Apple has sold in the same period, but Samsung’s sales rate is catching up.
Research firm Strategy Analytics said the Galaxy S3 overtook Apple’s iPhone 4S as the world’s best-selling smartphone for the first time in the third quarter of last year, as Apple fans were holding off for the iPhone 5.
The iPhone 5 took back the crown in the fourth quarter.
